


The Celebration of the Body Rapturous

by chaemera



Series: Victorian Eldritch [5]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Other, Religion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-05
Updated: 2018-05-05
Packaged: 2019-05-02 08:26:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14540700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaemera/pseuds/chaemera





	The Celebration of the Body Rapturous

A religion that shares territory with the Church of the Sun Father, the Body Rapturous is often simplified and denigrated by its detractors as a sex-cult at best, a collection of drunken hooligans at worst. While this is not entirely inaccurate, it is incomplete in a large way.

The Rapturous (also sometimes known as Celebrants) believe that by experiencing joy, they are helping preserve all of Creation. While it may sound rather silly on the surface, they approach it as a question of the entropy equation: the simple act of existence devours energy, and thus the only way to continue existence on a grand scale is to feed energy back into the system. And the purest form of energy is Rapture. Thus, all the parties, the drugs, the sex, are merely techniques for engendering and enhancing joy. Not necessarily pleasure (though that almost always is attached), but honestly and truly enjoying the act of being alive. Just as often (and frequently concurrently), Rapturous Festivals may be orgies or group-therapy sessions.

While it might be easy to assume that any given Celebrant is concerned with their own joy first and foremost (and some may be, certainly), the tenants of the faith also place heavy weight upon making sure those around you are experiencing joy as well. Selfishness is one of the few sins in this faith; going back to entropy, it is regarded as hoarding energy for yourself, to the detriment of others. Likewise, destroying or preventing joy is regarded as maliciously removing energy from an already impoverished system.

Interestingly enough, the Body Rapturous has an afterlife: those that leave the world a better place than they found it, who surpass their energy footprint in effect, go on to become one with the Rapture, the source of all life and joy. On the other hand, those that devour light and leave the world colder in their wake are cast into the Void, where they have nothing but their own failures to contemplate for as long as they maintain their faculties.


End file.
